It was all right for Derek. He liked driving the bus. He liked wrestling with the gearbox on the hills. It took muscle to turn the steering wheel. He’d get called a thieving gyppo, like the rest of us, or a pikey, or an asylum, but he got respect too. He was a prophet with plumbing skills. What more could you ask for?
He was a believer, Derek, I’m not saying he wasn’t. But God’s plans had an uncanny way of falling into line with his own convenience. So when his back started playing up and it got hard for him to steer the bus along those backstreets and country roads, his revelation at Bible study shouldn’t have been such a surprise. But it got everyone’s attention. Even in mum there was a shift from one kind of stillness to another.
Mum. My mum, Penny’s mum. She was there, more or less, on the bus with the rest of us. And she did her share of the work, though maybe not so much mothering. It seems to me now that she held the bus together. Arguments ran aground against her silence. She wasn’t calm, exactly. She was a light bulb that flickered from time to time as though it might go out. The less she said the more the others waited. ‘What do you think, Flo?’ someone would ask. ‘I’m right though, Flo, aren’t I?’ And they’d wait while she flickered off and on again. If I ever doubted that there was a world of the spirit more real than this one, I only had to look at her. For all his visions, Derek seemed too heavy-footed to get anywhere near Heaven. My mother was already halfway there.
So who was looking out for Penny? It wasn’t so bad as long as the bus kept moving. But everything changed when we parked in Lloyd Morgan’s field and the tyres went soft and the weeds grew.
Agnes
The worst thing has happened. I thought the worst would be a flogging, or to be sent from the Hall and never study with Sarah again, but this is worse.
Mother is dead and I am locked in the red room.
I’m not the first. Were there others when I was young? Before I can remember, there were others, I know that for certain. Before I was born. I dreamt just now that they spoke to me one after another while I lay in bed.
Yesterday I was with Brendan at the O. We’d been gone from the village for two days and I thought we would come back and find everything the same.
I was comfortable against Brendan’s back as we came near the Hall and lost in my own thoughts. But something was wrong. I felt it in his body even before he spoke. He pointed and there were flecks of light away on the moorland road.
‘Go home,’ he said. ‘If something’s happened, Janet will tell you.’
I slid to the ground. Brendan took me by the wrist and held me hard. ‘Remember, Agnes. Tell no one. Trust no one.’
I nodded and he let me go.
What gives a cottage life when work is done and the candles are out? When you walk past on the street what tells you all is well with your neighbours? Do you feel the warmth of their breathing or hear through the walls the snorts of sleep? I don’t know if the silence I heard was truly different, but I knew I was alone. When I opened the door to our cottage it was the pig I thought to hear first, but heard nothing. I stood in the kitchen, wondering. Someone came in at the back and I thought a scrounger was come to murder me. Then he spoke and it was Roland. ‘Everyone was looking for you,’ he said, ‘but they’ve gone now to the moor.’
‘Then someone is dead.’
‘Where were you?’
‘Where does my mother say I was?’
‘You should come with me. Most people have set off. The men will be digging.’
‘I can’t hear the pig. Listen, Roland. She roots around in the straw under the staircase. Did mother leave her out in the yard?’
He looked at the floor then and told me, ‘Your mother is dead and the pig strung up in Morton’s shed with its throat cut.’
‘Dead of what cause?’
‘You should come with me to the moor. They’ll be finished digging soon enough. You know she must be buried by daybreak.’
‘You go,’ I said, ‘and you can tell them you found me sick and I’ll be there soon.’ I couldn’t be with Roland. He was angry with me, and I couldn’t blame him. He had more reason to be angry with me than he knew. I wanted not to be with anyone.
When he was gone, to quiet myself I went and sat in the murk. It’s a mournful place and fitted my mood. I stared out through the glass towards the broken walls of the ruin where they say the Monk once lived. The river beyond it was dark and the birch trees looked pale against it. I thought of drowning and wondered how my mother had died. I heard the warblers in the reed bed and the wind hushing them, but I had no one to hush me. No one to say, Sleep Agnes, let the old day rest behind the hill. And so I pulled the door closed to be more alone. It moved as stiff as an old dog and whined like a dog too. I knew then that the murk hadn’t always been like this, scabbed with rust and mossed over, yellow tendrils straggling across its floor, the leather chairs dry and cracked showing their insides of twisted wire and wool like a ewe caught in a hedge. It once gleamed like a scrubbed kettle and people sat happy in it. Perhaps it even moved, as people say, all by itself, its metal wheels carrying it out along the drive and over the bridge into the village, to the cottage where I used to live with mother and must now live alone. Or out past the ruin and into the forest towards the towers of the endtime and the O where the Jane Writer hums.
I remembered that in the pictures there were closed carts, much like this, that moved with no horses to pull them.
Then it came to me that while I was off enjoying strange pleasures my mother was left alone to die. It was as though a hand reached inside and squeezed the breath out of me. I knew I was to blame. I hunched over with the pain of it, resting my head on the wheel. I rocked back and forward again, hitting my head to see if one pain would drive out another. When I stopped, I felt the broken skin and saw the stain of blood on my finger. And I found I was angry. Wasn’t it always like this, Janet sapping the joy out of everything, making me feel bad? Why had the earth taken my father and let her live on, sad and useless?
After a while I took the moorland road and came on the villagers gathered for her burial. The men had done digging the pit and were laying the kindling for the fire. Faces turned to me as I walked through the bracken. The torchlight moved on them so that they seemed to scowl and grin and scowl again.
Mother’s body lay beside the pit, wrapped in a sheet. I walked towards her and the villagers moved aside, but when I came close Peter stepped up to block my way. His coat smelt warm and mealy from baking bread. Morton limped to join him all cow dung and stale milk. I said I wanted to see my mother, I wanted to see her face before they shovelled earth and stones on her. Peter looked away and said something I couldn’t hear. I pushed at him but he held me. He mumbled about the pig, and spat into the bracken, and said she wasn’t fit to be seen.
‘What, though, about the pig? Why is the pig killed?’
It was Morton who answered, his face near mine. ‘Janet cut her own throat, Agnes, as she sat with the pig for company.’ It was an unkind thought that didn’t need saying. I thought it was bad luck for Annie to have a father like that, and worse luck for me to have no father at all, and now no mother either.